Since my last post I had a hard drive failure and lost all my work since July, including the two drawings I posted recently. So, I decided to redraw the dandelion image.
Last time I used tile clones but looking back on it the positioning of the fluff was far too geometric,
so I got rid of the tile clones idea and redrew each seed instead of generating them. I think this looks more natural.
Not quite sure what to do with the stalk yet.
Here’s another possible table number doodle and an experiment in tile cloning. I can’t figure out whether I like it with or without the leaves better. I think for the real thing I’d have to tidy the leaves up a bit. Maybe it looks too plain without them?
I’m bored and waiting on the UPS guy to arrive with my new cable so I thought I’d post yesterday evening’s doodle. 
Can you guess what it is yet? Yeah it’s supposed to be an orchid. I was playing about with inkscape and needed a subject so I drew one of the orchid flowers from the pot on my desk.
I’m not especially happy with it but I can’t decide what needs done to make it better. That little knobbly bit needs some work and probably the lower petal is out of proportion. I think it’s not realistic enough to go for realism and it’s much too complicated to have a graphic or stylised look. I might experiment later in simplifying it.
Hope the UPS guy arrives soon. The danger of electrocution is slightly worrying.
Well, I finally got round to printing out my decal onto the static cling film I bought a few weeks ago. The results are a little disappointing. Firstly I didn’t realise the “film” was of such a heavy grade. If it was paper it would be about 120 gsm or heavier. It’s about the thickness of cartridge paper. So although it clings statically, film is a bit of an exaggeration. As as result I couldn’t have it curve around the corner of my laptop towards the screen – it’s just not flexible enough. I used a product called “Print & Go Vision”. It was the only variety of static cling film I was able to get my hands on without buying in from abroad. If it had been half the weight it would have been much more successful.
As well as that I also forgot to flip the image before printing. No big deal but since the film isn’t quite what I was looking for I don’t think I’ll bother reprinting. It doesn’t help that the printer made my octopus a bit on the brown side.
Still, it looks quite nice sitting on the top of my MacBook and I like the depth created by having a coloured layer sitting on top of the white. Photos to follow.
When will I learn my lesson about being in drunken charge of a camera?
My first mistake was drinking 6 glasses (I should really say plastic cups) of champagne while helping Gemma get ready for her wedding. The photographer wasn’t around much while she was getting ready so I got my camera to grab some pics of her before the ceremony. Then more champagne.
The ceremony went well and I got lots of nice pictures of them walking in, exchanging rings, signing the register etc. I also got plenty of photos of the drinks reception, some family shots, the speeches, cutting the cake, the first dance. During this time I managed another 2 glasses of wine and 2 (or was it 3) more of champagne. Oh dear. I didn’t notice I was drunk.
Then I had the bright idea to change the format from large jpg to raw. Oops, did I just press “Format”?! Nooooooooo! Everything gone, cleared off the card. I was so annoyed I actually cried. The shock had sobered me up by at least 2 glasses of wine and thankfully I had the presence of mind to swap cards before taking any photos.
I borrowed another CF card and got some more pictures of the reception.
After some research on the webbernet it was begining to look hopeful. We were able to copy the contents of the card onto Tony’s computer and pull pretty much all the images out from there. I think a few may have been missing but thankfully nothing important was lost. Tony’s computer runs Ubuntu and in case you’re interested he’s working on a write up at ten.ynottony.net
I didn’t try recovering it on the mac but I was interested to try out one of the many free recovery programs for Windows (that computer runs 2000). For that I used “Art Plus Digital Photography Recovery”. I found it on download.com. The results were pretty good. Not quite as good as on Tony’s computer. Some of the images came in with coloured bands and it was quite slow but it did find a few that were missed the first time round. I’d recommend if you’re using it to run it through a few times and choose a new folder each time and then compare them. It was very simple to use if the linux way seems too scary.
But anyway – what a relief!
A couple of days ago I decided to make a decal for my MacBook.
I decided static cling vinyl (the stuff window stickers are made from) would be a good idea. Unfortunately there seems to be a lack of it around here – at least where I looked – but after much hunting I found a place on the webernet that sells clear static cling film and what’s even better than that is that it will go through an inkjet.
I was thinking I might do some kind of leafy pattern that would look good in monochrome if I could get the single colour vinyl. The plan was to cut it out with a craft knife and the white of my MacBook could fill in the blanks. Once I realised I could print it there were a lot more options available.
I sketched out this octopus last night and scanned it earlier. I had to do a lot of cleaning up because I’d also sketched where the design was going to sit on my laptop. The paper was kind of crumbled so it scanned in with a lot of noise as you can see. That triangle at the bottom right is the dead area since the octopus is going to wrap around the top left corner of my laptop so that the tentacles are coming towards the screen.
After a basic clean up in gimp using the rubber stamp tool to get rid of the pen marks I added some transparent layers and traced out the parts that came in too light. I used the dodge tool to lighten it a bit so it blended in better with the sketch since I wanted to keep the pencil drawing look.
The white was removed from the original picture using the select by colour tool. I left a lot of the noise in for effect. 
The colouring was pretty easy and I used the spray tool and smudge to blend the colours. I didn’t work within the lines too much – who cares?
Finally I added a transparent layer and traced around the octopus in white to cut out a lot of the gubbins around the sides. I should have really used a mask for this but having messed about with them for half an hour I gave up and took the less easy way out.
Now I just need to wait for my film to arrive. Will post a picture when it’s all printed up and stuck on.
I got the last few photos together and have laid out the photo montage (I just wanted to write montage) for the back of the business cards. I did this in GIMP and used guidelines to lay it out in a grid. Good. Now I need to add some space for bleeding, which I think goes on the outside of the measured size. I’m not sure, will need to check it out. Since the back is made up of lots of images I’m going to output it in some bitmap format at 600dpi. Fine. Easy.
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